The moat is proprietary data
When the software stops being hard to build, it stops being worth defending. What is left is the signal nobody else is positioned to collect.
A year ago, building an analytics platform was a project. Now an operator with the right tools can stand one up in a weekend. So the platform stopped being the moat.
What is left is the data. If you own a stream of data nobody else can get, you can build things nobody else can build. That is durable in a way software no longer is.
It is why Roth River, a company I started, is moving into hardware. A sensor in the world, a unique IoT component, produces a signal only we have. The software around it is replaceable. The signal is not.
If you sit on a process, a place, or a population that generates signal, that signal is the asset. Instrument it before someone else does.
What this looks like at enterprise scale, where the data has to stay walled off and governed, is here.